Escaping the Malthusian Trap
It Looms Once Again, But Can Be Permanently Escaped With Free Energy
An energetic framework can be so helpful for understanding the human journey. I believe that Earl Cook’s work is the first place that I saw it. I slightly revised his work for this table, and I was on my way to my Epochal framework. Mammals were always relatively brainy, primates even more so, and when monkeys left the canopy and became apes, it set in motion the events that led to humanity.
Chimps use tools but bonobos don’t, and when some apes evolved to become bipeds, their hands were freed for new uses, which led to crafting stone tools, which initiated runaway brain growth, which led to humans. Each Epoch of the human journey was made possible by energy breakthroughs. Without those breakthroughs, we would still be bipedal apes, and not every breakthrough happened for all humans. Even today, most of humanity does not really live in the Fourth Epoch, not like comfortable Westerners do. Australians stayed in their Second Epoch until the British invaded, probably because they could not hunt kangaroos to extinction.
With each new Epoch, humanity’s surplus energy increased, which was an increase in real wealth, and human societies became more humane. Today’s Westerners can scarcely imagine the daily privations and barbarities of prior Epochs. They get a glimpse when they visit agrarian nations and are shocked by what they encounter. But until industrialization and its energy-powered machines, an increase in energy consumption mostly meant more mouths to feed. Just like all animals, humans always bred to the limits of the environment’s carrying capacity, so the golden ages of energy breakthroughs were always short-lived, and then it was back to the brink of survival. That dynamic is called the Malthusian trap.
Feeding a machine with energy instead of a human results in ten times as much work getting done. England’s energy consumption increased by more than an order of magnitude as it industrialized, it increasingly fed machines, and that was the essence of industrialization, as standards of living skyrocketed into unimagined levels. One outcome was the elimination of childhood death, which is the biggest event in the human journey so far. It had nothing to do with medical interventions, but improvements in sanitation, hygiene, and nutrition, which were side effects of industrialization.
Industrialization allowed humanity to escape the Malthusian trap for the first time. However, the hydrocarbon fuels that have powered industrial societies are being burned up a million times as fast as they were created and will be largely depleted in this century. The USA reached peak oil-extraction rates in 1970, and the American standard of living has declined since then. I was raised in one of those short-lived golden ages. Average Americans consume 15% less energy than they did in 1970.
The world reached peak oil-extraction rates in 2006, and the Malthusian trap looms once more, as the energy runs out. As Brian O’Leary stated, all of today’s so-called energy alternatives are too little and too late. The only thing that is going to save humanity from a catastrophe that could take humanity with it is what I call free energy, which is a permanent energy solution and the foundation for the next Epoch, which will end the world as we know it. The technology that taps that novel energy source is older than I am, but is sequestered from public awareness and public use for reasons of Earthly power, and almost nobody on Earth understands the issues in the slightest. This is our chance to become a truly sentient species, or it might be a sled ride to oblivion. My life has been spent trying to help people understand and choose the Fifth Epoch instead of oblivion. If enough of us do, it will be easy, and the Malthusian trap will never loom again.